But what I got was more of Popalong.
7
But the boss kept me working even if I wasn’t any good. It wasn’t a place that got much business and nobody else wanted to work there because the pay was cheap. Lucky for the boss, I didn’t need much and no one else would have me. He let me watch television there at the station between cars. I was between cars a lot.
The money I made kept me in Twinkies and Cokes, TV Guide and the cable. I saved up and bought a VCR. I bought a belt like my father used to beat me. I was cozy. I lived in a one-room, walk-up apartment that smelled like the winos in the doorways below. I often saw them when I was walking to work, shuffling ahead of me in search of a bottle. For some reason they made me think of Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath.
At night I would take the belt like my father’s and slap my naked back with it. I did this while I watched tapes of Hopalong Cassidy reruns. Hopalong had a face like my father’s. Watching him made the beltings work all the better. I slapped myself until I bled. I tore pages from the TV Guide and stuck them to my back to stop the blood. Sometimes there were not enough pages.
When I finished, I would put the videotape of The Bible into the VCR and watch a few minutes of that while I knelt and held the box the tape had come out of. I prayed there would be no electrical blackouts while I was watching a movie, I prayed my television would not wear out until I could afford a big-screen TV. I prayed I would someday have a place of my own away from the noise of the winos, a place where I could have a satellite dish and fill my head with channels. I wondered who I was praying to.
So it went until a week before Halloween. I was on my way home from work eager to get my belt and put in the Hopalong tape, and what do I see in the window of the costume shop between Sylvester the Cat and a pirate outfit but a Hopalong Cassidy costume. I felt weak in the knees.
I went in there and blew all the money I had. I knew I would have to buy some cheap brand of soft drink and some sort of pastry that wouldn’t match Twinkies, but I had my Hopalong suit, complete with hat and boots and holsters, though the guns in it were cap pistols.
When I got home I put the outfit on and looked in the mirror. I was disappointed. My shoulders were not as broad as Hoppy’s and my face was nothing to look at. I didn’t look like my father who looked like Hoppy. I looked like a weasel staring out of the woods.
I took off the suit and hung it in the closet and put the boots below and the hat on a shelf above. I discovered if I left the closet door cracked and turned on the end table light, or if the moonlight came through the window just right, it looked like Hoppy was standing in there, hiding, waiting to come out and beat me with a belt or shoot me with his pistols.
I liked that. The suit was not a total loss.
Then about Christmastime I saw this special on random killers. I noted that most of them had sad little faces like mine. But here they were with their sad little faces going out to millions while I lay in bed holding my dick. They had done things like pump hot lead into warm bodies, and all I could do was shoot a pathetic wet bullet onto my sheets. What they had done brought camera crews out, and they got their pictures taken. Got seen by millions. Got to be stars. What I had was more laundry.
But when the special was over, I knew what I wanted to do.
I had to save my money again, and this meant I didn’t eat very much, but I never really cared that much for eating anyway. The more I thought about what I wanted to do, the more excited I got, and the more I took the belt to myself. When I showered it looked as if red paint were running down the drain.
I took to wearing the Hopalong outfit. I didn’t look any better in it, but I didn’t care anymore. I knew what I wanted now, and knowing made me feel better about myself.
First I bought a car from my boss for three hundred dollars. A white Ford Fairlane. I was not a good driver, but I knew how. I could get from one place to the next if I could get my mind off television. I tried to pretend that I was part of a television show like Miami Vice, and I was patrolling the streets for crime. I drove every day so I could get better at it, but I never learned to like it.
Then I saved up enough to get the rifle. A Winchester with an old-fashioned lever. I had it replaced with a loop cock like the one John Wayne had in Stagecoach. It was no big problem to get the rifle. I merely had to sign some papers. It didn’t matter to me that later they would be able to trace it. I wanted them to.
By the time the summer came around I was able to buy two pearl-handled, silver-tooled pistols and enough ammunition for them and the Winchester. Again, I merely had to sign some papers.
I went home and took the cap guns out of the holsters and put in the real. 45s after I loaded them. I loaded the Winchester and put it in the closet. I watched a video of The Wild Bunch.
Next afternoon after work, I put the rifle in the trunk of my car and went back in and put the Hopalong outfit and gun belt on. The real guns weighed more than the cap pistols, but I liked their weight. It was like waking up and having muscles.
When I went out to the car the second time, a wino saw me. He said, “Man, who you supposed to be, Hopalong Cassidy?”
“That’s right,” I said, and pulled one of the. 45s and shot at him. I missed him by a mile. The bullet went past him and smacked into the doorway of the apartment house. The wino ran around the corner, and I shot at him again. This shot wasn’t any better. He got away. My marksmanship worried me some.
I drove out of town, and by the time I got to the overpass, it was starting to get dark. I pulled over next to the concrete wall and unlocked the trunk and got the rifle. It was dark now. I could see the lights of the cars, but to see who was in them I had to let them get pretty close to the overpass so the lights there would shine down on them and give me a look.
I watched a few go by before I shot at anybody. Guess I was getting the feel of things.
I picked one out and aimed between the headlights, then lifted the rifle barrel above that so I could center on the windshield, then I moved the barrel to the driver’s position and pulled the trigger.
First time didn’t work because I had the safety on. The car went beneath the underpass and on.
I took off the safety and waited for another car, remembered to cock the lever and jack a shell into the chamber. I felt like Lucas McCain, the Rifleman.
Next car that came I shot at, and I don’t know if I hit anyone or not, but it veered off the road, then back on, and went under the overpass and kept going, very fast. Next car I hit someone because it went off the road and through a barbed wire fence right before it reached the underpass. I saw a man stumble out of it and fall down in the pasture and get up. I took a couple of shots at him, and I guess I finally hit him because he fell down and didn’t get up. I shot once more in his direction, then went back to watching cars.
A station wagon was next, and I put a shot into it and it ran into the side of the overpass and a woman opened the door part of the way and fell out. The lights from the overpass were bright on the windshield in the car, and I could see a child in a baby seat on the passenger’s side. I could even hear it crying.
I leveled the rifle and fired until I finally hit it and it shut up. I figured I had done enough then. I was a celebrity, though no one knew it yet. I could just imagine being apprehended and handcuffed and the television cameras coming out and taking my picture in my Hopalong outfit, and then taking pictures of my pistols and my loop-cock Winchester. I hoped they’d let me see myself on television in the jail. But just knowing I was going to be there was a great thrill. I was, for the first time in my life, somebody.
At first I thought I should turn myself in, but this seemed too easy. I would let them come for me. I might take a few shots at them, then, if they fired back, I would toss out my weapons and say I quit; I had watched that sort of thing on television more than once. They didn’t kill you if you quit. After I got on television, I didn’t care what they did with me.